Mr. Obama’s Wise Immigration Plan

People gathered in New York to watch President Obama's speech.CreditCreditKevin Hagen/Getty Images

President Obama’s speech Thursday night on immigration ended on a high, hopeful note. Mr. Obama, quoting Scripture’s admonition to welcome and protect the stranger, told millions who have lived and worked here for years, many of them Americans in all but name: We cannot fix your situation yet, but for now we will not expel you, because we have better hopes for you here.

A speech is not a solution, of course, and now that it is over, the hard work begins. Efforts over the last decade to repair immigration have repeatedly ended in failure, leaving the meanness of the broken status quo.

Now, though, there are reasons for encouragement, tempered with caution. Mr. Obama’s plan to register and give working papers to perhaps four million to five million people has rightly gained the most attention, but he and the Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, have also declared a sweeping reordering of immigration enforcement. They are ending Secure Communities, a blighted program that used local police to funnel arrested immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In theory, this widened the dragnet for dangerous criminals. But in practice, it terrorized the innocent, alienated immigrant neighborhoods from their police protectors and encouraged — nationalized — Arizona-style campaigns of indiscriminate immigration crackdowns and racial profiling.

The replacement for Secure Communities will be called the Priority Enforcement Program, and it is meant to pursue only high-priority deportation targets. The local police will no longer routinely be asked to detain immigrants on ICE’s behalf — in violation of the Fourth Amendment — but asked instead simply to notify ICE when a wanted suspect is about to be released.

This could fulfill Mr. Obama’s promise to use the deportation machinery only against real threats. But history is littered with similar efforts at reprioritizing that failed. It is unclear how this fixes the problems of abusive and discriminatory policing that arise before an immigrant is jailed. Immigrant advocates are right to greet this apparent improvement with caution.

Other worries are administrative. There is a crying need for legal representation for immigrants, and adding an immense new program covering millions will burden the system still more. Many gaps are filled by energetic networks of nonprofit and low-cost legal advocates, but also by fraudsters. Not everyone is lucky enough to live in New York, where a groundbreaking effort, the Immigrant Justice Corps, has announced that it is doubling its outreach — with 50 lawyers and 30 community advocates — in response to the Obama plan.

Other advocacy groups nationwide are helping immigrants as they start collecting documents and saving money for what is expected to be an expensive application process. Executive action will be a big undertaking, and it’s reasonable to be concerned about the ability of the administration and legal services organizations to handle it.

But these are good worries to have. Mr. Obama’s initiative is a real gain, which must be held against the blowback from Republicans, who are grasping for justification to match their outrage and to block him on legal grounds. Presidential precedent, the law and Supreme Court affirmation all favor Mr. Obama.

The reality of the status quo is paralysis, in which nobody is ever legalized and most people are never deported. That is another form of amnesty — the amnesty of inaction — though none on the right who oppose reform would ever admit it. The White House is beginning a campaign to defend its action by stressing the economic and law enforcement benefits of bringing millions in from outside the law. The most immediate and profound benefit is the lifting of fear in immigrant communities, even though perhaps half of the undocumented population will still be left out. Many parents will be excluded, and many families will be broken. Their struggle will continue.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Obama’s Wise Immigration Plan. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe